BALTIMORE, Jan. 11, 2017 /PRNewswire/
-- Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc.
(Nasdaq: SBGI) today commented on multiple news organizations
that have recently published or perpetuated misleading and
irresponsible reports regarding Sinclair's political coverage of
the Trump and Clinton campaigns. The recent reporting by the
Washington Post was too egregious for the Company to stand by
quietly and not inform the public of the incomplete and misleading
coverage published by a once respected newspaper.
Below is an Op Ed from the Company submitted to the Washington
Post, that the Post refused to publish. Immediately below is a
reply letter to the Editorial Page Editor of the Washington Post,
Fred Hiatt, requesting that they
reconsider in order to set the record straight with their readers.
The Post offered Sinclair a 200 word letter to the editor which
Sinclair did not consider to be a reasonable response.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Letter to Fred Hiatt and
Fred Reynolds of the Washington Post
submitted by Sinclair's VP of News, Scott
Livingston on Wednesday, January 4,
2017.
"I'm disappointed to learn that you are not publishing
John Solomon's op-ed article. I
believe you need to reconsider this decision since what you
published didn't reflect the truth about our political coverage of
the Trump and Clinton presidential campaigns. Refusing to
publish this is a major disservice to your readers. This is
another example of your bias and reckless regard for the
truth.
Your piece on Sinclair's political coverage was misleading and
irresponsible. Many key facts were omitted, facts that
your newspaper was aware of and refused to include in the article.
Your story was largely based on details published in a
Politico article from the previous week. Sinclair went above
and beyond with interview offers to both campaigns. This was
a fully-transparent project called "Beyond the Podium" where
candidates could speak directly and at length to viewers on
key topics. The simple fact is that one candidate took
advantage of this offer and the other did not. We did make a point
to have a democratic party spokesperson or Clinton surrogate on
each week. Yet those details were ignored in favor of a
more salacious story smacking of intrigue and conspiracy.
Readers of your newspaper deserved that additional context when
assessing Sinclair's actions and motivations with our "Beyond the
Podium" initiative.
The Post story contained misinformation, which could easily
have been vetted by your editor, prior to publication.
You owed it to your readers not to publish a story that
purposely omitted many of the key facts we shared with your
reporter. The least you can do is publish this
Op-Ed.
After some simple journalistic due diligence, the
chair of the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics
Committee, Andrew Seaman, concluded that our
coverage was fair and met the journalistic standards that were
ignored by numerous news organizations including Politico and The
Washington Post. Here is an apology he wrote after posting an
article based on the misinformation.
'After hearing from Sinclair's representatives and viewing
emails between the company and former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton's campaign, I don't
believe the interview arrangements fell outside what would be
considered ethical journalism. Therefore, I apologize to Sinclair
for assuming the Politico story, which was based off third-party
reports, was accurate. From what I can tell, the situation is a
victim of a game of telephone. One person makes a statement,
another person repeats that statement with some errors and it
builds upon itself. Unfortunately, I made myself part of the chain
by not reaching out to Sinclair for clarification. I'm sorry.'
Moving forward, our news organization is committed to tracking
the truth and holding accountable other media organizations
that publish misleading, biased and fake news stories. We have
a responsibility to our viewers to identify organizations and
members of the media that disregard the truth."
_____________________________________________________________________________
Op Ed: By John Solomon
submitted to the Washington Post on December
30, 2016.
Washington Post, Politico and the perils of centimeter-deep
journalism
A month into my experience as a Washington Post reporter,
I was sitting alone in the newspaper's cafeteria when a stoic voice
chimed in. "Mind if I join you?" I peered up to see Ben Bradlee, the news giant most journalists of
my post-Watergate generation grew up pining to work for.
Kind yet salty, Ben sat down and quickly inspired a conversation
about the future of journalism. The year was 2007, and the news
industry was enduring vast disruption from the advance of the
internet. Ben quickly painted a picture of a bleak future he wanted
to avoid, one where he-said-she-said journalism became an accepted
substitute for undisputed facts. And an era where reporters might
lack the resources or attention span to decipher truth from
fiction.
"Truth can't be proven in just 15-second sound bites or 100-word
web files. Precision can't be achieved if a reporter has just
some of the accurate facts. And reporting, if it is to
remain in the public interest, can't succeed if it is just a
centimeter deep," the wise old mentor proclaimed.
Nearly a decade later, Ben's words, scrawled inside my
reporter's notebook that day, seem all the more prescient after two
spawns of the Bradlee era of journalism – the modern-day
Washington Post and Politico – reported stories
recently about the company I now work for, Sinclair Broadcast
Group.
Politico was the first to report, from anonymous sources,
that Donald Trump's son-in-law and
campaign strategist Jared Kushner
purportedly told a private audience the campaign had struck a
"deal" with Sinclair, the largest owner of TV stations in America,
to provide "straighter" news coverage in return for regular
interview access with the candidate.
Politico reporters Hadas
Gold and Josh Dawsey were
unable to reach Kushner to get a further explanation. Instead, they
interviewed Sinclair's news chief, Scott
Livingston, who disputed with bundles of written proof that
there was any "deal." In fact, Livingston explained, the interviews
with Trump were part of a larger initiative called Beyond the
Podium in which both Trump and Hillary
Clinton were offered regular interviews with Sinclair
reporters to discuss their stance on issues. Trump accepted;
Clinton did not.
Politico was offered a chance to look at the emails
between Sinclair's journalists and both campaigns, but demurred. It
also declined a chance to review the interview videos Sinclair
journalists conducted to see if they provided "softball"
treatment.
What Politico wrote was the classic he-said-she-said
story that Bradlee fretted about. There was no refereeing of the
truth, no deeper dive into the facts, no way for a reader to
determine truth from fiction. It simply led with the anonymous
descriptions of Kushner's comments, followed by Sinclair's denial a
few paragraphs later and added a cryptic insinuation that some
thought money changed hands.
The Washington Post's Paul Farhi took the story a
step further. Like an exercise of Boy Scouts passing a message down
a line, only to have it misconstrued, he embellished the
Politico story with an even sexier headline. Farhi
proclaimed Sinclair had "helped" Donald
Trump's campaign. Instead of "straighter" coverage like
Kushner was originally quoted as saying, the newspaper declared
Sinclair had provided "favorable" coverage. With a catchy turn of a
phrase, Farhi even injected his own opinion that Livingston's
denial appeared to "be at odds" with Kushner's comments.
Once again, journalism was reduced to he-said-she-said
storytelling. And to further its case, the Post quoted from
some leaked newsroom documents suggesting Sinclair somehow tried to
further help Trump by mandating all stations air the interviews and
providing some of the questions for anchors or reporters to
ask.
I was a firsthand witness to what happened between Sinclair and
the campaigns. As head of Sinclair's new millennial news site
Circa.com, I joined Livingston in pursuing the candidate
interviews. The Beyond the Podium initiative was paired with
the Circa Challenge so that some of the interviews would be
conducted by Circa journalists asking questions about millennial
issues, a la MTV years ago.
None of that information, including the contemporaneous emails,
were ever included by Politico or the Post. None of
the raw video interviews were ever reviewed by the reporters to see
how Sinclair reporters conducted themselves. And most of the daily
"mandatory carry" emails sent from Sinclair to stations were never
reviewed, save for the few selected leaks. Instead, insinuation was
substituted for in-depth factual reporting.
Had these reporters gone deeper, here is what they would have
found:
- The first substantive discussions for candidate interviews with
Sinclair occurred with the Clinton campaign on July 1, about five weeks before the Trump
campaign finally engaged on the idea on Aug.
8. And Sinclair had scored an earlier interview with
Secretary Clinton in the spring.
- Sinclair executives – more than 20 times – pleaded with
Clinton's team to engage on the interviews before and after Trump
took us up on the offer.
- Sinclair and Circa employees asked tough questions of Trump,
like would his child care tax credit include gay parents (something
his evangelical base would oppose) and why he accepted the
endorsement of Dick Cheney after
years of opposing Cheney's war in Iraq.
- Sinclair and Circa produced Trump interview packages where Mrs.
Clinton's side of the story was included for balance, even though
she passed on the interview offers.
- Most of the Sinclair packages explained the Beyond the
Podium initiative and made clear Clinton had been offered the
same opportunity.
- Sinclair mandated that stations also "must carry" its
interviews with Clinton running mate Tim
Kaine, Clinton's millennial outreach team and VP Joe Biden,
just like it did the Trump interviews. The reason? Sinclair prides
itself on adding exclusive national news to its local
newscasts.
- Sinclair livestreamed numerous Clinton political events and
speeches on its Web sites, just like Trump
Apparently these facts could not penetrate the centimeter-deep
reporting bunkers of both news organizations.
The impact inside Sinclair was real. After the two stories ran,
I surveyed Circa's millennial newsroom. Ninety percent of those who
attended my meeting initially thought Sinclair "had gone in the
tank" for Trump and nearly half believed Sinclair had paid money
for the interviews. When asked why, one employee said it was
because Politico was a respected news organization that
should be trusted even when its reporting was being disputed.
To counter such false impressions, we invited our reporters to
look at the full slate of written evidence omitted from the two
stories. The Society of Professional Journalists, which originally
criticized Sinclair based on the Politico story, apologized after
seeing the omitted facts. Such things have helped quell
concerns, though I doubt Sinclair will ever fully dispel the faux
distrust planted by these two stories.
I don't fault Politico or the Post for treating
Kushner's comments as news. I don't fault Kushner for saying what
he said, since as a businessman he might have seen our initiative
as a good opportunity for either candidate. I don't doubt there are
executives inside Sinclair, like every news organization, who
wanted Trump or Clinton to win. I only find fault in the failure of
the Post and Politico to report enough of the facts
for a consumer to make their own decision. Likewise, both should
feel some shame in portraying "straight" coverage of candidates'
positions on issues – something news organizations once strived to
achieve – as a dirty equivalent to "favorable" treatment.
I suspect it was this sort of half-baked reporting that Bradlee
foresaw when he warned a decade earlier of the perils of
centimeter-deep journalism.
John Solomon is an
award-winning investigative journalist whose three decades of work
for The Associated Press, The Washington Post and The Washington Times exposed scandals in both GOP and
Democratic administrations. He currently serves as COO of the
Sinclair owned Circa.com news site.
About Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc.
Sinclair is one of the largest and most diversified television
broadcasting companies in the country. Including pending
transactions, Sinclair, operates and/or provides services to 173
television stations in 81 markets, broadcasting 483 channels and
having affiliations with all the major networks. Sinclair is the
leading local news provider in the country, as well as a producer
of live sports content. Sinclair's content is delivered via
multiple-platforms, including over-the-air, multi-channel video
program distributors, and digital platforms. The Company regularly
uses its website as a key source of company information which can
be accessed at www.sbgi.net.
MEDIA
CONTACT:
Scott Livingston, VP News,
Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc.
410-568-1500
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SOURCE Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc.